I think we have to look at state currencies in countries where the state actually distributes the majority of the social product as things that are intermediate between the sort of Money that Marx analysed in Capital and the simple labour account system he refers to in the critique of the Gotha Programme of the German Workers Party.
Recall what he said about the credit system: Conceptions which have some meaning on a less developed stage of capitalist production, become quite meaningless here. Success and failure both lead here to a centralisation of capital, and thus to expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from the direct producers to the smaller and the medium-sized capitalists themselves. It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals. With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter's social property, much as they are their social products. However, this expropriation appears within the capitalist system in a contradictory form, as appropriation of social property by a few; and credit lends the latter more and more the aspect of pure adventurers. Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock-exchange wolves, There is antagonism against the old form in the stock companies, in which social means of production appear as private property; but the conversion to the form of stock still remains ensnared in the trammels of capitalism; hence, instead of overcoming the antithesis between the character of wealth as social and as private wealth, the stock companies merely develop it in a new form. The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises. into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.Capital, Vol.3, Chapter 27 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm (3 of 6) [23/08/2000 16:02:58] The SEK is an instance of a new set of social relations arising initially with the form of the old, but they are not yet in the position to cast off the old form completely. Although the Swedish state is the primary distribution mechanism for the social product, it exists in symbiosis with the capitalist economy which requires a transferable unit of command over labour. The question I am interested in is how this regulation of transitional money forms works, and how it is different from the Euro. In the case of the Euro two key factors are missing: 1. The states that administer social welfare and raise taxes do not have the right to issue money. 2. The organisation which nominally controls the issue of money - the EU, has negigible tax rasing power and distributes only a minor part of the social product I think one can see the institution of the EU as a reaction by the rentier class against the tendancy of state money to displace the monopoly control over social labour exerted by Capital. By attempting to move the creation of the monetary unit away from the taxing state and into an autonomous bank, they are attempting to regress to the sort of money that existed under the gold standard. But this sort of money is incompatible with the social relations that have grown up in Europe over the last 75 years or so. ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jim Devine [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2012 8:31 PM To: Progressive Economics Subject: Re: [Pen-l] FW: Determinaton of the value of state token money On Tuesday, Paul wrote: > ... What I take [Marx] to be saying here [in the famous 1868 letter to > Kugelman] is that the 'law of value' is the law of the proportionate > distribution of social labour, that this is a natural law which can not be > done away with. Only the form of its appearance can change.< this suggests that there are _two_ meanings for the phrase "law of value": one refers to "the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labor" (Marx, describing commodity production) and the other to human society _in general_. I don't find it worthwhile to argue about the meaning of words, so I won't do so. But I do have a question: if we're using a "law of value" to describe a system that does not produce commodities, how can the value of money be relevant at all? is it simply formal money of account (used in accounting)? -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you should at least know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
